Japanese trading house Marubeni has said it has received an order for 16 Nikon LCD-making machines from China's Beijing BOE Display Technology. The equipment will be installed in the China-based company's 8.5-generation thin film transistor LCD panel production line.

The company, which receives licensing fees from patents of its memory chip designs, lost US$23.3 million compared with a loss of US$15.5 million in fourth-quarter 2008.

Samsung Electronics has overtaken Hewlett-Packard as the world's biggest technology company by sales, a sign of how strongly some South Korean companies have bounced back from the economic downturn.

Creditors rescued Hynix after it almost collapsed in 2001 under the weight of its debts. Spurred on by the company's strong turnround and a brighter outlook for the semiconductor sector, creditors have been anxious to sell to recoup their original investment worth US$4.6 billion.

"The iPad appears to be a swelled-up version of the iPod Touch. ... It is expected to become a niche market," an analyst at Hana Daetoo Securities told The Korea Herald.

"Am I setting very aggressive targets? Yes," said Ibrahim Ajami, CEO of Advanced Technology Investment Co., Globalfoundries' controlling shareholder. "We need to be a US$5 billion company in the next two to three years."

According to Intel and Micron, the 25nm, 8Gb device is currently sampling, and is expected to enter mass production before the second half of 2010.

The US economy grew by an annualised rate of 5.7% between October and December, official figures have shown. But even with the rebound, GDP shrank by 2.4% across 2009 as a whole.

Meeting that goal would require the president to engage in a fight to the death with the liberal wing of his own party, persuade China to allow its currency to appreciate 40%, get global economic growth to outperform the salad days from 2003 to 2007, and lower taxes for American companies that do business abroad. And, while he is at it, forget about strengthening the dollar in the foreseeable future.

SanDisk beat analysts' estimates as sales for memory cards for mobile phones, digital cameras, USB flash drives and other electronics climbed 22% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter.

In 2009, TSMC topped the list of foundries with US$9.0 billion in sales. TSMC's sales were about 3X that of UMC, which in turn had more than the combined foundry sales of Chartered and SMIC in 2009.

Apple's iPad device may significantly increase demand for components such as touch screens and memory chips, especially if it succeeds in creating a new product category and spawning competitors, according to industry analysts.

The Japanese conglomerate, whose business encompasses everything from memory chips to household electronics to nuclear power plants, has said it booked a much smaller loss in the October-December quarter than a year earlier.

Korea Exchange Bank has confirmed that the creditors of Hynix Semiconductor failed to receive any bids for their stake in the chip maker by the deadline.